> All you need is a way to map the identity to the address, which does not have to be centralized (even though the current implementation in Syncthing, outside

> All you need is a way to map the identity to the address, which does not have to be centralized (even though the current implementation in Syncthing, outside of broadcast-based local address discovery, is centralized); bittorrent DHT manages to map a torrent's hash to a set of addresses without needing any central node. That's true; but I think bittorrent DHT is the only decentralized one that seems have succeeded (I remember quite a few unsuccessful attempts two decades ago), and its success is probably related to its use case - it is of everyone's interest to have hashes well-mapped in case you'd need them. > Some older peer-to-peer protocols from over a decade ago already securely mirrored data in nodes belonging to other users. And for various reasons, they are all gone, whereas e.g. rfc822 email - which is properly decentralized/federated but does require a stable online node, is still going strong nearly 40 years later, despite somewhat successful attempts to re-centralize it by the likes of google. I think it's inherent - many people now only have a phone, but no one wants a service that becomes unavailable when you lose your phone or step in a faraday cage -- there even used to be on-phone voicemails back in the dumb phone days -- as peer to peer as dumb phones can get -- and they were not popular for the same reasons. And if it is indeed inherent, it would be better to take it into account when designing the next stage.